A Parade of Self-Important Fools

Naturalist writers who don’t have the imagination to come up with new ideas run out of stories to tell. They make a big splash with a novel about their youth or their particular racial niche, and then they are pretty much done. They “write themselves out.”

Barack Obama’s speech at the 2012 Democrat National Convention was the work of a man who is written out. He has nothing new to say; he lacks even the energy to make it look like he’s trying. But that didn’t stop him from going on for 37 empty minutes. Stalin and Castro were famous for droning on for hours before a (literally) captive audience. I believe Obama and Clinton would do the same if they could. Standing before a large, adoring audience must be the peak experience for a collectivist.

Obama’s speech was shockingly banal. Charles Krauthammer called it, ‘One of the emptiest I’ve ever heard on a national stage.’ Is this the best his speechwriting staff could come up with? How bad a tin ear must Obama have to say, “I’m the President”? As Stephen Green wrote,

That is the smallest line I have heard a President say in 32 years of listening to presidents speak.

If the left criticizes Romney, the rich and Republicans for being callous plutocrats looking down upon the little people, and they do, there is no better example that it’s Obama, the New Left and Democrats that hold America and Americans in contempt and seek to command them shut up, kneel and obey government control. It was the ultimate appeal to authority: the power-lusting Nothing Man might as well have said “I’m the dictator.”

When a man is under pressure, you see the real man. I believe this election is showing us what Thomas Sowell calls Obama’s “confident ignorance.” Obama has lived in the leftist bubble all his life. He thinks altruism-statism-collectivism is moral, and nothing in reality can dent his ideology. Michael Barone thinks Obama should have pivoted to the center as Clinton did after the 1994 election; the President has shown he stays true to the left. If he were a Republican, he would be denounced as a radical or an extremist, but to the mainstream media Democrats can never be extreme. Dick Morris says this strategy is a loser.

I think Obama actually believes Keynesian economics work. Of course, all his life among leftists he had never been exposed to Ludwig von Mises or Henry Hazlitt or Fredric Bastiat or other economists that make my spirit soar when I read them because they are rational and brilliant. (Seriously, if you think economics is “the dismal science,” you have been reading the wrong economists.) In reality the stimulus package made things worse, as did the spectre of ObamaCare and Cap and Trade, among the hordes of regulations coming out of the federal government. Reality has been slapping Obama in the face since day one of his presidency, and it has got him down — but he won’t change his beliefs; indeed, that is the one thing he cannot allow himself to do. If he questions his ideology, then his entire universe will shatter, and his self-esteem with it. There are reports the man gets more excited about cards, bowling and golf than policy matters. I would not be surprised if deep down he wanted to lose in November so he could climb back in the liberal bubble and evade the consequences of his disastrous ideas in the real world.

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Clinton’s speech was the more exciting of the two because he is more a romanticist — of himself. The prospect of penning dithyrambs to himself gets Clinton’s blood moving faster than an intern in kneepads. In a speech that was supposed to be about nominating Obama, Clinton glorified himself over and over, and managed to remind the audience that Obama is cool on the outside and has failed to deliver on the economy. Clinton sneakily even brought up the birther issue. While mocking Romney/Ryan, Clinton said:

They looked good, they sounded good. They convinced me…(LAUGHTER)… that they all love their families and their children, and we’re grateful they’ve been born in America, and all –really, I’m not being — they did.

Why would we be grateful they were “born in America”? What does that have to do with anything? I don’t think it’s a mistake that there’s a lot of nonsense out there about Obama’s birthplace. More important, there is uneasiness about Obama’s allegience to American values, the subject of a movie currently in theatres, 2016: Obama’s America. In 2008 the Obama campaign called the Clintons racist; you think Bill has forgotten that? You think he is above mentioning that Romney and Ryan were born in America just to plant seeds of doubt in voters’ minds about Obama?

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One political party is full of ignorant, mean-spirited bigots. Everybody know it’s the Republicans, right? Wrong. The Democrats really are ignorant, mean-spirited bigots. Watch this video.

They took God and Jerusalem out of the platform, then put it back in even though there was no two-thirds quorum, and the audience booed. As an atheist, booing God is fine with me, but I wonder if Democrats understand they must win the votes of the American people. And why at this point would Jewish people vote Democrat? The left has become anti-semitic.

Rush Limbaugh said he was physically ill before the DNC began, and was “180 degrees better” after watching Obama’s speech.

This picture is telling. Obama does not look happy. Does he know something we don’t know? Well, he did say that if he didn’t turn the economy around in three years he would be a one-termer.

“10:17: The speech ends, and there’s a flurry of confetti. No balloons, because an indoor presentation hadn’t been planned. Obama steps forward and waves. There’s a closeup of his face and I think I see his lip curl with a bit of disgust, and I call rewind and ask Meade to interpret the face and he says: resignation. Subjectively, we think we see in his face that he knows he’s going to lose. Michelle and Malia and Sasha come out, looking perfectly glossy and pretty, and then there’s Biden and Jill and Mrs. Robinson and various other relatives, milling around, waving a bit, and then the long view of the stage shows they’ve clumped toward the rear wall. Why are they huddling there? The shots of the crowd show some ecstatic delegates — all women — and many stolid/dispirited faces — male and female. At one point there’s a hitch in the Bruce Springsteen music — a silent gap — but then it plays again. And now they’re gone.” — Ann Althouse

That Daily Show bit was a rare gem, they’re normally like Pravda, only trying on purpose to be funny. Their team probably went out to the convention to poke fun at them a little and instead found that they were nearly immune to irony. (which is something I’ve been saying at least since they had those schoolchildren singing Nazi-esque hymns to Obama)

The Daily Show is like Pravda in that they spew forth a geyser of unmitigated propagandistic Left Wing bulls**t. The only difference being that, while Pravda was sometimes unintentionally hilarious, The Daily Show is trying on purpose to be funny. Every now and then it succeeds, if you can resist the urge to shoot your TV, Elvis-style, long enough to actually witness it.

National Security Workforce to Address ‘Intersectionality’: do you ever get the sense that you’re in a waking nightmare? Money quote from the memo: “Our greatest asset in protecting the homeland and advancing our interests abroad is the talent and diversity of our national security workforce.”

Last Week Tonight on Donald Trump: bit long, but great takedown of the Trump mythos. In a more rational political environment, this would have killed his presidential campaign. I’m not sure it’ll make any difference.

A Responsibility I Take Seriously: nominee must be “without any particular ideology or agenda” and have “a keen understanding that justice is not about abstract legal theory, nor some footnote in a dusty casebook.” I sure hope the Republicans can hold the line on his nominations.

Trigger Warnings in Annapolis: I’m not sure why I expected the service academies to be bastions of academic freedom, but I did. It’s much worse than the universities since they’re far more hierarchical.

Announcing the Twitter Trust & Safety Council: this is within their rights, of course. Given the leftist leanings of the company and its assembled Council of Goodspeech, I suspect that some groups will get a pass and some will face suppression. Chilling at any rate.